Vote Labour if you are conservative, vote Independent if you recognize the urgent need for radical change

Twenty-seven years ago, one day before I would leave the UK for Brazil, never (yet) to return, I watched the British Labour Party win a landslide victory and Tony Blair appointed Prime Minister. Although I had no illusions as to Blair’s socialist credentials, I was excited and vaguely optimistic to see a Labour government elected for the first time in my adult life, after 17 years of Conservative rule. I duly delayed my departure from the UK to witness this momentous occasion.

I was encouraged that Tony Blair had included in his cabinet some figures from the left of the party. Early on, policy decisions seemed reasonable and fair. The Northern Ireland peace accord was a major achievement; partial devolution of power, in Scotland, Wales and London, was long overdue. Britain seemed to gain a new lease of life. A spring in the step. The economy boomed. Then later, although I strongly opposed the war in Iraq, I continued to support the Labour Party, urging people to vote for it in 2005, even when many colleagues and friends with more friable loyalties were defecting to the Lib Dems.

Those of us on the left of the Labour party, it should be added, have always supported our party in elections, through thick and thin. This contrasts tellingly with those on the right, who have, since 1981, formed a breakaway party, been lukewarm about support during elections, and, most recently, in 2019, actively endeavored, through heinous accusations and slurs, to sabotage their own party’s 2019 election campaign.

Five years later, after much internecine bloodletting, on a scale that would still have been unthinkable under the leadership of Neil Kinnock or Tony Blair, we are on the verge of another Labour election victory – although perhaps not so much of a landslide as is widely anticipated. Now, however, I find myself filled with nothing of the same excitement—albeit muted—that I felt in 1997. My disillusionment with the current Labour leadership has now grown so overwhelming that I no longer feel I am able to support the Party in the upcoming election on July 4^th.

There can be no denying that the last 14 years have been disastrous for Britain—a test case in government mismanagement, beginning with needless austerity and vacillation in relation to Europe, moving on through the economic and moral catastrophe of Brexit, and then slowly fizzling out with the hypocrisy and callous buffoonery of over-privileged ministers during the COVID pandemic, the infantile folly of free-market Thatcherite economics taken (briefly) to the extreme, and, more recently, misgovernment by business-minded individuals guided by management consultants exposed for all to see.

Perhaps we should be grateful to the Conservative Party for having finally laid to rest any illusions regarding its economic competence and sense of fairness and justice; for having clearly revealed that the time is now ripe for all of this to be swept finally aside by a government keen to install a fresh more fair-minded project ready to take the reins of power. Such an opportunity has, after all, not presented itself since July 1945.

And yet, I do not believe that the Labour Party under the present leadership is ready or even willing to take on this challenge. I believe that a party led by a tinpot Robespierre will fail to make the radical change necessary and will ultimately hand the Tories (or worse) a quick ticket back into power. It is, therefore, with a very heavy heart that, this year, for the first time ever, I am urging people who truly yearn for radical change NOT to vote Labour. Those of us—and we are many—who do see the need for a fundamental social transformation deserve to have our voices heard. But the British Labour Party is clearly no longer the megaphone through which to do so.

And so, to those of a conservative bent who do not hanker after such radical change, I say go ahead, vote Labour. Whether you are conservative Labour voters or mainstream Conservatives, Labour is your natural political home now. To those, however, who understand the need for genuine change—to tackle inequality, the housing crisis, the failure of the education system, and the declining state the nation’s health, to take bold action on climate change, and to further the cause of national self-determination and democracy at home and abroad, I urge you not to be led astray by the Mephistophelian deceptions of the extreme right (within the Tory party or without), nor by the empty promises of fair-weather opportunistic parties who pretend to occupy the center ground, nor by the will o’ the wisp fairytales put about by the Greens.

The next government will almost certainly be Labour. Labour is the new conservative party. But let us try to ensure that the opposition is not a far-right rump but a body of independent-minded progressive thinkers eager (in collaboration with like-minded colleagues in the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru, and Sinn Fein) to make the genuine changes to the politics and the economic system that still prevail in the not-so United Kingdom that are so desperately needed. I therefore urge those of you who live and vote in England, to let this silenced voice be heard by standing as and/or voting for progressive-minded independent candidates in the 2024 elections in the UK. Although there is much to be desperate about, let us not fall into despair. Let us see this as a golden opportunity to effect not merely a change of government, but to make the first steps towards effecting the much-needed much more radical transformation that circumstances clearly demand.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash